Anonymous also breached the servers of another BART website, releasing data on about 2,000 BART riders.

This past week, a former employee of the
U.S. subsidiary of Japanese
pharmaceutical company Shionogi
pled guilty to United States federal
charges that he remotely deleted the contents of 15 virtual hosts on the
company's network after he had left the firm's employ.

Finally, security vendors McAfee
and Kaspersky are hurling angry exchanges over Operation Shady
Rat,
which McAfee
announced to the world earlier this month.

The AntiSec Hack

The information AntiSec published on the Web after breaking into the
account of VanGuard's Garcia includes notes about internal meetings,
contracts, schematics and other sensitive information.

A purported French woman with the online handle "Lamaline" claimed responsibility on behalf of Anonymous for the hack into the servers of the
Bart Police Officers Association.

The hacker published the names, email and street addresses and email
passwords of 102 association members.

Doing the Shionogi Shuffle

From the courts comes a chilling tale of long-distance retribution in
the case of the U.S. subsidiary of Japanese pharmaceutical firm
Shionogi.

Jason Cornish, a
Georgia man who had resigned from the company, gained unauthorized
access to Shionogi's network through a user account and then deleted the
contents of 15 virtual hosts in the IT system, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The deleted servers housed most of Shionogi's American computer
infrastructure, including email and BlackBerry servers, the order
tracking system and financial management software. Shionogi sustained
about US$800,000 worth of damage.

Cornish launched the attack from a McDonald's in Smyrna, Ga., over the
wireless network provided by the fast food outlet to customers. He had secretly installed a VMware management dashboard at some
point before leaving the company.

The attack was launched in retaliation for the firing of Cornish's
friend and supervisor, who had hired him back as a consultant after he
resigned as a full-time employee.

The best way to prevent attacks like this is to have a proper log
monitoring system.

"You must ensure that your IT system logs provide adequate detail,
including things such as source IP and verified user identity," Eric
Chiu, founder and president of
HyTrust, told TechNewsWorld. "You also
need a granular description of what is actually happening, and must
monitor denied actions, which could indicate that someone is fishing
for vulnerabilities."

However, it would be difficult to find a back door secretly installed by someone in IT, Chiu warned.

Shady Rat Gnaws at Security Vendors

Remember Operation Shady Rat, the massive years-long campaign of
cybersecurity attacks and theft of information McAfee recently announced with
much fanfare?

Some security experts decried the announcement as containing nothing
new and suggested McAfee was seeking publicity.

Eugene Kaspersky's
blog was
particularly hard hitting, dismissing McAfee's claims as being
"largely unfounded and not a good measure of the real threat level,"
among other things.

McAfee spokesperson Heather Edell pointed TechNewsWorld to
a
tweet by Dmitriy Alperovitch,
McAfee's vice president of threat research and the person who
announced Shady Rat, in response.

Alperovitch is "the only one who can really take the lead" on
answering TechNewsWorld's questions, and he was out of the country and
unavailable, Edell said.

The slapfest between the two vendors continues.

Richard Adhikari has written about high-tech for leading industry publications since the 1990s and wonders where it's all leading to. Will implanted RFID chips in humans be the Mark of the Beast? Will nanotech solve our coming food crisis? Does Sturgeon's Law still hold true?